(My previous posts on Marooned are needed for context.)
I have finished the game, using the time-old technique known as “reading the source code”. I am fairly sure I would have made zero progress otherwise. This just gets absurd, and not due to bugs.
I’m not going to sequence in order of how I “solved” things or in narrative order, but rather from most to least reasonable.
Money from under the big W.
Let’s start with the treasure under the trees I couldn’t get to. As I suspected, it was a straight parser issue.
Things that don’t work: DIG, DIG TREES, DIG UNDER, DIG BETWEEN, GO TREES, DIG W, FIND SPOT, FOLLOW MAP, DIG SPOT, DIG TREASURE, FIND TREASURE, LOCATE TREASURE.
The game was fishing for GO W, and then DIG.
This was the treasure with no name originally, hence the fix calling it MYSTERY TREASURE. Now I know the context, there’s a fair chance this was intended as SUITCASE OF CASH.
Not terrible for a work in progress, but it still stuck me entirely. To grab from the source code, I used software called Scottdec:
141) 1 56 [GO W] /* MISSING STRING */
? PLAYER_IN (13 = *I’m on the west shore of a deserted island)
? CLEARED_BIT (22)
-> 1 = PRINT(OK)
-> 58 = SET_BIT (22)
This is much cleaner than trying to read off the database file directly, which has “1 56” on its own without the verb and noun linked to it. The “missing string” comment is supposed to go somewhere else, but it looks like something in the sequence of comments is out of sync.
Next up is the cave, with the tiny hole and the chisel.
I had additionally tried LOOK HOLE, FEEL HOLE, RUB HOLE, and pretty much anything on my standard verb list that seemed reasonable, but unfortunately, the game uses a brand-new verb I have never seen before in a text adventure: REACH HOLE.
This isn’t done yet! Despite the diamond being a treasure with asterisks, the treasure can be made into two treasures, via CUT DIAMOND / WITH CHISEL.
If you get greedy and try to get yet more treasures by repeating the process, the diamond gets ground into dust.
The really wacky thing here is that one is not necessarily more valuable than the other (except in a black-market sense, except we aren’t going to make it that far). No, it’s simply taking the fact that the game wants, abstractly, 7 treasures, and can only get all the way there by turning one distinct treasure into two.
There is incidentally a “clue” earlier about the diamond, but it is a complete red herring clue (in the Ferret sense of being actively misleading).
There is no boat. BOAT is listed as a noun so I wonder if the author considered this, changed his mind, and never got around to cleaning up the clue (work in progress!) as opposed to creating an intentional red herring.
Nearly to the end now, to the most absurd jump of all. I knew from the start of the Scottdec file what the goal was:
TGoal: store 7 treasures in room 24
Room 24 is a HUT, but we haven’t seen one, because you’re supposed to make it. With the leaves from the trees and the string from the dead body, you can (on the west side of the island, at the W) use the command MAKE HUT.
Now, you can GO HUT and deposit treasures. We’re one short, but after a little time here is a “quick flash of red light”; LOOK LIGHT reveals a RUBY. Amusingly, it doesn’t even need to be picked up, just revealed.
Oh, on the darkness: from the source code I found there is an overall light timer, so it wasn’t the flashlight turning off the sun, just the game being mean. It gets so dark at night you literally can’t see anything at all.
Like Strange Adventure, we are king of an island at the finale with no visible way off. Enjoy your two diamonds!
129) 52 35 [MAKE HUT] /* 2 DIAMONDS TO DUST */
? IS_AVAIL (65 = String)
? IS_AVAIL (45 = Leaves)
? PLAYER_IN (13 = *I’m on the west shore of a deserted island)
? IS_AVAIL (47 = Leaves)
-> 1 = PRINT(OK)
-> 73 = CONTINUE:
130) [Cont’d] /* NOTHING ELSE WORKS */
-> 53 = MOVE_INTO_AR (63 = Hut)
-> 59 = REMOVE (45 = Leaves)
-> 59 = REMOVE (47 = Leaves)
If this was a published game, the hut puzzle would enter the all-time most absurd list; it gets an asterisk due to the work-in-progress nature of the game, since the author may have had some plan in mind before running out of space.
I do think, now, regarding “why this was unfinished”: it was a matter of running out of memory space. In order to fix the TAKE commands, the code went up to 19k, and that’s excluding items like the screwdriver and leaving in numerous other erroneous parts that the author clearly intended to get back to later. The game doesn’t seem large/impressive but Watt did try to write a list of features that started to extend past the game’s reach. SCREW is intended as a verb (unused); the BOAT is listed but doesn’t show; there’s ICE and a BOOK for some reason. I tried to cross-correlate with other Scott Adams games (in case one served as a template and these are “vestigial words” left in) but no dice: I’m pretty sure everything listed is something the author intended eventually. Hitting a wall like this from an original plan is bound to be frustrating for development and it is a miracle at all the game was left close to a state that could be played all the way through.
Coming up: Three Britgames, followed by games from Japan, New Zealand, and Denmark. This will be our first 1983 game in Japanese, and neither New Zealand nor Denmark have appeared on this blog before.
Renga in Blue 
I admit that finishing the game without knowing the code would be nearly impossible; it’s clearly missing some kind of clues, and much more feedback.
Regarding the mysterious treasure, you’re right. If I’d realized the movie reference, I would have called it “Suitcase Full of Cash” or something similar.
Regarding the darkness, I hadn’t noticed the timer for nightfall, but there was also a bug with the flashlight, so if you turned it off in a lit area, it always left you in the dark, or at least that’s what happened to me.
There’s not much else to the game, other than the fact that the knife is a red herring, and if you try to cut the initial diamond with it, it turns into dust. Perhaps the idea was that you’d need the knife to cut the palm tree leaves, but it never ended up being implemented.
Considering the game’s content, which isn’t that much, I get the impression that Scott Adams had to use a few tricks to keep his content under 16K.
It doesn’t feel like Watt did anything “wrong” in terms of space taken by the code, just what he wanted to do with content didn’t fit. It’s nice to see this sort of thing because the answer to “why did half the objects not have any description” “why was this underclued” etc. for early-1980s is sometimes just lack of space but authors didn’t leave the evidence of that.
Scott Adams was a genius. He was able to do more with less than just about anyone. I think Watt sort of found this out the hard way, and threw in the towel. He may have been skilled with utilities, but there was a certain artform to successfully imitating the Adams playbook that he doesn’t seem to have quite gotten the hang of, unlike a number of obsessively single-minded teenage Adams acolytes of the era.
I looked at the code, and also noted a “COT” in there, as well as the speculated missing hammer. I wonder if that may have all been linked to the unimplemented boat, which seems to be referenced at least three different times. There’s also a hill and a rock, perhaps indicating some other unrealized location in the game.
Anyway, I have the feeling Watt threw in the towel too soon. He could have adapted his game’s vocabulary words to use three letters instead of four and saved even more space, and it seems to me that some of the messages he uses are very similar and could have been reused in the replies. Also, there’s a good portion of the database that’s only useful to the author and could have been removed: the descriptions of each of the more than 150 actions he implemented. These are only useful while you’re creating the game, because they can be left blank, as I did with the actions I added.
If he had applied all of that to the compacted database, it probably wouldn’t take up more than 10K, and he’d still have plenty of room to finish his game. Perhaps he didn’t like having to restrict himself so much when creating it.
I’m confused about the ruby. Where are we meant to understand that it comes from? Was it just there in the dirt where coincidentally we decided to build a hut and we didn’t happen to see it until a random moment? Was it somehow shaken loose from the building materials?
given we somehow managed to make a hut from just leaves and string, I’m going to go with it being a Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Mansion spell